Also this issue:

Around the Whirl
Behind, around and under the Cannes Film Festival.
-Anita Schillhorn van Veen

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

New Shorts

Continuing Shorts

Repertory Film

Showtimes

June 5-11, 2003

movies

Success Stories

HEART STRINGS: Kaige (with Tang Yun) drew on

his own experience for <i>Together</i>.

HEART STRINGS: Kaige (with Tang Yun) drew on his own experience for Together.

Chen Kaige on Together and the trouble with fame.

by Sam Adams

Just when Chen Kaige’s Together has lulled you into thinking it’s a standard triumph-over-adversity tale, the provincial father who’s given up everything to foster his son’s musical talents is asked by a prospective teacher, "Do you want consummate musicianship or fame and fortune?" Without hesitating, the father shoots back, "Fame and fortune."

We're so used to stories like this one, where people don't want success but get it anyway, that the burst of honesty strikes like a thunderbolt. With its supposed apolitical subject, the movie has been accused in some quarters of being Hollywood fodder, but Chen sees exactly the opposite. "Western people always see Chinese films as political allegory; if there's no political element, they get lost. But I want to tell you, Chinese people eventually learn to be happy. If you want to call yourself a rich people, you must live with genuine happiness."

If anything, Together reflects Chen taking a step away from the West, following his first attempt at English-language filmmaking, the straight-to-video Killing Me Softly. Over lunch at the Four Seasons, Chen says he doesn't regret making that movie, which he regards as a learning experience: "I realize there is another kind of censorship; you don't really have the freedom to express yourself in this country as well [as in China]. When you take movies as commercial product, you have to make a lot of people happy." On Killing Me Softly, stars were attached before Chen was offered the movie, and he was prevented from making script changes that he feels would have improved it significantly. For his next movie, The Promise, Chen is looking East instead of West, securing financing from Japan, Korea and China. "I want to make a movie with talent from different Asian countries, make it as an Asian movie, not just a Chinese film," he says.

Despite Together's perceived Western-ness -- a perception obviously shared by its distributors, who are giving Chen his biggest Stateside push since 1993's Farewell My Concubine -- Chen sees it as a referendum on Chinese culture, particularly on the push for young music prodigies. "I just felt like, why do so many Chinese children want to learn instruments? What's the point? It's all their parents' idea. They want to use music to open the door to fame and fortune."

It's a plight that applies not only to the film's star, himself a prodigal violinist, but Chen himself, who appears in the movie as a well-groomed violin teacher/star maker. "The young boy who played the part in the movie, I'm not sure he's going to have a nice future," Chen admits. "He became a celebrity in China because of this movie -- the success came too early, and too fast. I'm not sure he's ready for this." The connection with his own younger self is unavoidable, and Chen makes it readily. "The priority for a successful artist is to figure out how to survive the success, because you are no longer who you were," he says. "When I made my first movie, I never really felt any pressure, but after it becomes a winner you get lost. You don't know how to continue. What kind of story will interest you?"

Together opens Friday at Ritz East.